Is It Your Fault If You Can’t Heal Yourself? – Part 2

In Part 1 of this blog series Is It Your Fault If You Can’t Heal Yourself, I addressed the questions of whether or not we should blame or shame someone who is sick – and whether we should withhold conventional medical treatment so the mind can do the healing.

In Part 2 of this 4 part series, I want to address this question – if an optimally healthy body depends upon healthy thoughts, beliefs, and feelings that shut off the body’s stress responses and activate the body’s natural self-repair mechanisms, what does it mean if you’re trying to improve the health of your mind – but your body is still sick?

Improving The Health Of Your Mind

In my upcoming book Mind Over Medicine, I share with you the scientific data proving that the health of your mind strongly affects the health of your body, and I teach you a whole host of ways you can improve the health of your mind. But in short, a healthy mind requires:

Believing that the body can be optimally healthy

Healing limiting beliefs

Learning to put fear in its place so you’re not ruled by anxiety

Trusting that you are held and nurtured and safe, even when life feels scary

Fostering nurturing, loving relationships

Minimizing toxic relationships

Engaging in work you love

Expressing your creativity

Exploring your authentic sexual self

Ensuring that you live in an environment that relaxes you

Practicing radical self care

Moving through and releasing anger, resentment, and grief in healthy ways

Mind Over Medicine offers a variety of “prescriptions” for how to make the mind healthier. Even more so, it encourages you to write your own prescriptions for a healthy mind and body.

But What If You’re Doing All That – And You’re Still Sick?

Some people have done so much personal and spiritual growth work in an attempt to cure a “chronic” or “terminal” illness – and yet it’s not working. The body is still breaking down.

Why does this happen? Are they doing something “wrong?” This is where blame and shame tend to creep back in.

My high school boyfriend was raised in the Christian Science faith, and he was taught that illness was always the result of “wrong thinking” and lack of faith, that the treatment for illness was not a pharmaceutical or a surgery, but rather – a return from “wrong-minded thinking” to “right-minded thinking.”

So of course, every time he got sick – even from a little cold – he felt guilty, as if his mind was betraying him, outing him publicly with every little sneeze, for his wrong-headed thinking. His parents would badger him for thinking wrong thoughts. He’d question his own faith. And he’d feel like a total loser if he couldn’t heal himself and wound up succumbing to Western medical treatment.

This, of course, is not in any way what I’m suggesting.

Conscious Vs. Subconscious Thought

Some, like Dr. Bruce Lipton, author of The Biology Of Belief, argue that, even if our conscious minds are filled with positive, healing thoughts, our subconscious minds can be poisoned with toxic thoughts that aren’t even in our awareness. Negative beliefs we observe in our parents get involuntarily programmed into our subconscious minds at a young age, beliefs like “You’re weak” or “You’re going to wind up fat and saddled with diabetes when you grow up” or “You can’t heal yourself.”

Your subconscious mind gets filled with beliefs you download from parents, teachers, and others who influence you early in life, filling your mind with the programs that will run your life unless you learn to reprogram your subconscious mind. Usually, by the age of six, these programs are written, and few people ever make efforts to examine and rewrite their subconscious minds. Given that we have no control over how this powerful part of our brain gets programmed when we’re children, it’s no wonder most people struggle to change limiting and self-sabotaging beliefs that can harm not just their health, but all aspects of their lives.

Even if your conscious mind is filled with positive, hopeful thoughts, you operate from the subconscious mind 95% of the time. These habitual negative beliefs, which kick in anytime we’re not focusing our attention on positive thoughts, become the default. They operate when we’re sleeping, working, or anytime we’re not consciously repeating our positive affirmations. Such beliefs may then activate a type of nocebo effect, since if the subconscious mind believes you will get or stay sick, the brain perceives a threat and the stress response is triggered. Next thing you know, your body is suffering, and your mind’s best efforts to heal the body are thwarted.

Why Positive Thinking Isn’t Enough

The power of the subconscious mind explains why positive thinking only gets you so far. How many times have you read self-help books, taken workshops, made New Year’s resolutions, and vowed to improve your life, only to realize a year later that your life is no better? Since the conscious mind is only functioning 5% of the time, it has little power to overcome the weighty influence of the subconscious mind. To effect lasting changes in belief, you must change your beliefs not just at the level of the conscious mind, but in the subconscious mind.

Because of this, some people who are doing everything “right” to heal their bodies by optimizing the health of the mind fail to recover from illness. The mental shifts must happen in both the conscious and subconscious mind.

But What If Your Subconscious Mind Is Toxic?

I won’t get into it here, but Mind Over Medicine reviews a variety of techniques for healing negative thoughts buried in the subconscious mind so you can make your body ripe for miracles. Suffice it to say that it’s totally possible to change your thoughts and beliefs at a deep level, so you’re not dependent on keeping your conscious thoughts positive 24/7 (which is impossible anyway!)

Feel free to share the love if you liked this post

Hi Lissa ~ I’m so thrilled to read this blog post! I totally agree and understand what you are saying here. I’m a Certified LifeLine Practitioner and the LifeLine Technique works to help clear out those ‘toxic’ subconscious reactive patterns that are held in the body, mind, and beliefs that you are talking about! I would be very happy to share this technique with you ~ The founder of the LifeLIne Technique is Dr. Darren Weissman, and yes…Bruce Lipton’s work is part of the founding basis (as well as others) in the development of this beautiful technique! Please check it out! I am so grateful to you for following your path and blazing the way for the world to move forward into wellness!!! Infinite Love & Gratitude ~ Heather

Elke Neubeck

Hi Lisa, thank you for giving us the opportunity to share with you. Via my own experience and self healing practicing, I like to introduce a tool from the I GING system that works on all those so deep levels we no longer have access to. With the I GING system it is possible to release all that which is so deeply inside by simply using the booster.

On the other hand I realize in my own process at this moment that we are actually encountering situations again, similar before the Mayan calender stopped. I encounter these pains myself at this time, which had been released and thought are healed. While I hear there is never an end to it? I ask my self like you, why does this start again? My pendulum says it is an energetic upgrade. Like a little while ago our immune system was upgraded. Now I feel the lower part of our bodies is the target of an upgrade, meaning as well hormonal, sexual. I realize an increase of sexual energy and longing. The kundalini is strongly rising and we stand much firmer in our own energy. I tell myself that pain is also just an illusion, which changes the thought process instead of concentrating on the pain which would increase the pain. I may pick up an exercise I did not do for years. I use alchemy tools like the Rose to energetically assist my body. I feel we are more and more going into the age of imagination and visualisation instead of physically taking care of these issues. Everything is an illusion. We moving into the age of telepathy to release ourselves….?!

Oh Lissa, I have been enjoying reading your blogs, but your boyfriend’s experience
in Christian Science in no way matches my experience. Can we talk?
Christian Science is my chosen Spiritual path, but for me, love is the
very heart of this spiritual practice; and so badgering another person for
having a symptom of ill health is not something I would ever consider doing,
ever!
My fellow church member have always been compassionate, and supportive
with any problem I faced, physical or otherwise. In fact, one of the
reason’s I chose Christian Science as a spiritual
practice was the sweetness of the people I met there, (along with the
fact that I learned to demonstrate healings, for myself and family
members.) Similar to other spiritual practices, I do recognize that
trials are often indicators of a need for a transformation of some kind
and can be a call for more wholeness, more oneness and just more love on
my part. But fear, guilt, or blame are simply not attitudes that I have
found to promote that transformation and growth. The truths I am
learning about myself and my relationship with God are annihilating my
fears; not creating more. When my fears disappear, healing has been the
natural result: including things like an instantaneous healing of
pneumonia, flu, and a complete healing of a broken kneecap in a week,
without drugs or surgery. Some healings do take me longer, but our true
conscoiusness is something that is never stagnate, it is always
progressing- and I usually recognize my own growth, even when the body
doesn’t seem to be changing. For me Christian Science is about
discovering my truest, highest, most whole self. And through that
practice, I am thoroughly enjoying becoming a more compassionate and
loving person. Keep up the fantastic work Lissa, we are all working
together to promote wonderful changes in how we attain health.

Hm, interesting post. Two comments on this. First of all, I wonder if sometimes great souls (before birth) take on a role of absorbing a lot of illness/suffering for others – which for me would explain why there are people I know who have done huge amounts of personal work – but still get ill. Second one (and I suspect I’m going to get flak for this 🙂 ) is what I call the “tyranny of the weak” – there are people who use their illness to manipulate others, to get attention, to keep attention – I’m not saying they do it consciously but we all know the people who get “sick” when they are asked to step up to the mark or do something or who use their “illness” as a crutch.

Hey Lissa… thanks so much for this series of articles you’re writing. I look forward to installment #3!

As someone who has been practicing Christian Science his whole life, I thought it might be helpful to offer a counterbalance to the story you shared about your boyfriend – lest your readers think that that’s the norm for young Christian Scientists.

Both my parents were Christian Scientists and taught me from a very young age to see myself as the reflection/expression of an all-good God, as well as the beneficiary of His/Her unconditional love. Of course, like any other kid, I had to deal with bumps and bruises and sickness every now and then. But I can’t recall a single time when my parents ever blamed me for what was happening. On the contrary, they usually encouraged me to think more deeply about God’s love for me. The result was that not only did I recover from whatever malady I was facing, but I also gained a deeper sense of my closeness to the Divine.

This is an important question you’re asking. I have no doubt that your readers are benefitting from the discussion.

Dara

I know what you say is true about being able to reprogram the subconscious mind, but I have to say the thought of doing yet MORE internal work makes me tired. Yes, I know it’s necessary and apparently part of my path since I’m still sick with multiple chronic illnesses, but what I really want to do is just LIVE my life instead of constantly working to fix myself. “Fix” may not be the spiritually acceptable word, but after working pretty much non-stop since 1996 on reprogramming, awakening and healing virtually every area of myself – inside and out – I am bored with my thoughts, beliefs and “issues”. I look forward to reading your book for (hopefully) fresh and engaging ways to go deeper into what is still dysfunctional in my incredibly stubborn subconscious mind.

Well, I see what you’re saying, but I have to kind of agree with Dara that the idea of trying to control my subconscious mind sounds even more daunting than keeping an eye on the conscious one, which takes a great deal of effort anyway. I’ll be interested to see what your tips are in that regard, short of listening to subliminal tapes or something.

I already meditate, take very good care of my health, and do most of the things on your list above, and yet I still struggle with health and energy issues (although they have improved as a result of those efforts). I can’t really think of any programming from my youth that would have caused them, though, unless it’s a past-life issue.

Isn’t it possible that sometimes there’s just something wrong with people’s bodies? Or that they simply get sick because they’ve been exposed to germs or carcinogens? Some people are just born with genetic disorders, for example, so it’s hard to accept that they thought them up ahead of time (although some people do subscribe to that theory, I know).

I’m all for the influence of the mind and the body’s ability to heal itself, of course, but it just seems to me that certain things may be outside our control. How can we tell the difference? How do I know if it’s my body or my mind that’s causing the problem?